On the day her life changed, when she was 13 years old, Majlinda was on the way to help her aunt with the ironing of clothes in preparation for her cousin's wedding in their village in northern Albania. She was a little short of reaching the house when three strange men stopped her. They grabbed her, bundled her into a car, blindfolded, bound and gagged her; she was then driven to the southern town of Gjirokastra. Not until the men and Majlinda had crossed the border with Greece and reached Corinth was she told: 'Now you are going to work.'

'At first I did not know what they were talking about,' recalls Majlinda, 'until they took me to a flat where there were other women and told me: "You work here now." When I refused, they said they knew my family, and if I made trouble they would kill them. I thought of the possibilities. I was afraid to stay, I was afraid to leave, so I started to work - they forced me to, with violence.'

Beaten and raped into submission by her traffickers, Majlinda began work, confined to a flat, from 8pm until 5am, obliged to meet a monetary quota entailing some 20 clients a night. 'And even if I made enough money,' she says, 'they usually found a reason to beat me when the clients had finished for the night.'

Majlinda is scarred around the eyes and forehead. She talks at a shelter, back in Albania, to which she has escaped and at which she is hiding from her traffickers, trying to recover. Her expression is subdued, dead-pan. Outside the sun shines, but the room is leaden with her grief, and her story.

She was in Greece for a year, until 'the police started catching up with them. So we came back to Albania and took a speedboat to Italy.' Majlinda was sold on to Florence for a price she doesn't know. By now, 'there were two new Albanians in the group running me, also one remained from Greece.' She was forced to work the streets on the scrappy edges of the city, well hidden from the beauty of its renaissance centre. After dealing with her clients, Majlinda handed over the proceeds, upon which 'all three would violate me at the end of my work. They would get high on drugs - marijuana and cocaine - and come at me. And every night they beat me - even if I made the € 1,000 [£685] they insisted on, they always found an excuse.'

Majlinda's captors were part of a syndicate - it was clear to her that 'they exploited many other women as well as me, and had a number of houses, but would not let us meet.' There were 'good clients and bad clients,' she says. Good clients? 'I mean the ones who just wanted to have sex; the bad ones were the ones who beat me, or beat me and stole my money, so I had to work harder to earn it again.' The traffickers, she says, would 'compete against one another with the money they made out of me and the other women. They would compete for who could buy the flashiest car, or the best clothes.'

After a year in Florence, Majlinda was moved by car to Amsterdam. In the bustle, she says, 'I was surrounded by people, but completely alone. I could speak to no one. I lost all hope. I thought there was no way out. I was afraid that if I talked to anyone, the traffickers would do something to my family.'

Finally, a 'good client' from Afghanistan 'told me not to be afraid, and encouraged me to escape with him. I did, I trusted him, and became pregnant by him.' For a moment it seems that Majlinda's story will achieve some perverse redemption. 'But I was wrong,' she says, her hands kneading one another as she speaks. 'He wanted me to work for him instead, and he also beat me all the time. I gave birth to my child, and when that happened, I decided...

'I told my story to a woman who used to come and see my husband [which is how Majlinda describes the Afghan] and she in turn told me about some Catholic nuns at Utrecht who rescued prostitutes. And I went to them. They helped me register my child and get a ticket back to Albania.' But still Majlinda stares down at the table, and at her hands, as she speaks.

'I finally contacted my family and asked them to keep my son, but they didn't even want to see me, they were ashamed of me. My father said: "So far as we're concerned, you are dead." Thus rejected, Majlinda and her baby took refuge at a shelter in Albania's capital, Tirana, but she was obliged to leave her child at a place she will not discuss, and move on alone, after the Afghan came looking for his quarry and his son. 'This place is my last chance,' she says of the second shelter to which she came. 'But I am terrified he will come. And that I will see the Albanian men before my eyes once more.'

Majlinda's enslavement lasted four years. 'Men?' she ponders, 'I don't know what to say. All I know now is that I don't ever want to see another man in my life. All I want now is to be with my child, and to work. There were moments,' says Majlinda, now 17, 'when I thought I should not be alive, that I should be dead. But then I thought: why not? You have to be brave to survive. I have to be strong, otherwise I cannot get out of this.' And with that she smiles - the faint, hollow smile of the survivor.

Majlinda is but one - bold and fortunate enough to have escaped - among hundreds of thousands enslaved and entrapped by a depraved and burgeoning crime, one of the most lucrative and fastest-growing: trafficking in young women and children for enforced prostitution. In terms of the income it nets, trafficking is believed to lie in third place behind drugs and arms. There is evidence that criminal syndicates are switching from drugs to women and girls, finding them easier to transport than an assignment of cocaine or heroin. Moreover, a woman can be sold and resold over and over, while drugs can only be sold once.

The scale of the crime is impossible to quantify. The US State Department this year said it believed between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across borders each year; profits are estimated to be in the billions of dollars. And of those hundreds of thousands, an inestimable but high proportion are, under international law, children - under 18 years of age, and therefore entitled to special protection under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Documents produced by Unicef and Save the Children have found up to 80 per cent of those trafficked from some corners of Albania and Moldova to be children, with reports showing 'a decline in the average age of children/women being trafficked for prostitution'.

Trafficking is, crucially, distinct from people-smuggling or migration, with which it is often, erroneously - and disastrously - confused by policy makers. The pitiful business of smuggling occurs when a syndicate is paid to take a group of people across borders illegally but willingly, in search of work or asylum. And although some people may elect to be taken by their traffickers, a trafficked person does not sign up for the purposes to which they are put. Trafficking was defined by a UN convention in 2000 as meaning to recruit and transport people 'by means of threat or use of force, or other forms of coercion', such as abduction, fraud or deception, or, indeed, 'abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability'.

'We would all like specific numbers,' says Steve Ashby, programme director for Save the Children in Albania. 'But they are simply not available. What we can safely assume is that the numbers are high enough to warrant very serious concern. It is impossible to over-stress the level of oppression and brutality - the vicious abuse of human rights being inflicted by these traffickers. And the situation is going to get worse before it gets better.

'The trafficker,' says Ashby, 'is invariably ahead of the authorities. They are always finding alternative means to carry on. The phenomenon is shifting all the time. The trafficking problem outstrips all the efforts being made to control it.'

So far as Europe is concerned, the countries in which communism collapsed tend to provide both traffickers and trafficked. Moldova, Albania, Ukraine and Romania are the main source countries from which women are abducted. They are countries where social structures have imploded, where large sections of the economy are controlled by criminal syndicates and where communist regimes have been replaced by corruption as a means of political power. Trafficking has become integral to the economies of these countries - it is the source for fortunes, for cash to buy champagne and luxury cars, for profits laundered into resorts and hotels. The misery of women and children like Majlinda is a foundation stone for many a new concrete tower in Tirana or Chisinau. 'All along the line,' says Ashby, 'there is a chain of people involved in this trade, if you can call it that. The traffickers themselves, transporters, forgers of documents, safe houses, speedboats that take them from Albania to Italy - a great network of commercial interests engaged in the business.'

There are so-called 'destination' countries in Eastern Europe, too, but the vast, hidden and terrifying 'markets' are wider and elsewhere - across Western Europe and, ever more, into Russia, Turkey, Israel, the Middle East and the Gulf states. The victims, invariably, are drafted from the vulnerable and subjugated quarters of East European society - from desperately poor villages, from rugged mountains, from shanty slums. This is the new criminal power play in the new Europe.

Albania is a land of dire poverty, fierce patriotism, rugged mountains in the north, olive groves and vines to the south - for decades cut off from the rest of Europe and now opened up to a Western dream world with which it is bombarded on television, to which its youth aspires. It is a country whence tens of thousands of girls are trafficked and through which women are brought from other parts of Eastern Europe to Greece or Italy, and thence across Europe. The same syndicates are opening up new channels, after a clampdown on the Adriatic sea route, through Serbia and the former Yugoslav countries into the West.

'It is estimated,' says a report commissioned by Unicef, 'that over the past 10 years, 100,000 Albanian women and girls have been trafficked to Western Europe and other Balkan countries. Albania is also one of the main transit countries for the trafficking of women and girls from central and Eastern Europe.' In Albania, fear of abduction by traffickers is so great that the numbers of teenaged girls attending high school in rural areas has fallen dramatically. In remote areas, 'as many as 90 per cent of girls no longer receive a high-school education,' says a report by Save the Children. 'Even here in Tirana, they are afraid,' warns Svetlana Roko, who runs a day centre for trafficked children and children at risk in the capital. 'The Albanian pimp,' says the report, 'has a reputation for extreme ruthlessness, and murder is not uncommon.' In one case in which a woman agreed to testify to the police in Italy, her father returned home to find the mutilated remains of his other daughter splattered around the house.

Some women are simply kidnapped, others are lured by promises of work. 'It depends,' says Vera Lesko, who runs a shelter for trafficked women in Vlora, in the Albanian south. 'They could be promised a modelling career, work in shops, serving in bars and, more recently, they have been enticed by promises of academic scholarships. However, when they come to me they are totally destroyed, physically and psychologically. What we try to do is give them back their lives, tell them that their suffering is past, that they should focus on their own value, on what they have. We try to re-integrate them, to teach them vocational skills. We send them to schools in Vlora, with other women who do not know their background.'

But in spite of all this, says Lesko, 'The majority are simply re-trafficked when they return. They have nothing; they are annihilated. I had a woman who had been trafficked and re-trafficked for 10 years. She did not know how to live in a different way. Something inside her had changed forever.'

Traffickers, says Lesko, hang around police stations waiting to pick up their prey as soon as they are released. In many cases, there is collusion between police and traffickers. However - in defence of her work and in praise of those who come to her - 'a not insignificant number make it. They re-integrate, they remake themselves, and that is when all this work seems worthwhile.'

About this article

Streets of despair

This article appeared on p20 of the Observer Magazine section of the Observer
on Saturday 2 October 2004.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 09.50 EDT on Sunday 3 October 2004.
It was first published at 09.50 EDT on Saturday 2 October 2004.